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Afilias, a consortium of 18 global domain name registrations, was awarded the right to operate the new .info registry in November 2000.
"The Internet has grown tremendously since the .com domain name was established, and people wishing to register new names find that .com names are already gone," said Roland LaPlante, chief marketing officer for Afilias.
LaPlante said the .info domain name will be the only Internet domain name that will be "truly international in scope," and he also said it will be the only "unrestricted domain name" on the Internet.
"People want information from the Internet on subjects of interest to them," said LaPlante. "The .info domain name will be the first place that people will go for the information they want."
Ireland was chosen as the headquarters for the new operation because it has a well-educated and articulate workforce, good technologies, and attractive tax benefits. Dublin was chosen in particular for its overall capabilities, its infrastructure and its talented work base, he added.
The company expects people purchasing a .info domain name to be those who are already on the Internet, but without a .com name as well those wishing to expand their services to a wider audience and those moving to the wireless Internet.
It is expected that some 3,000,000 names will be registered with a .info name within the first year of the domain being established, and that there will be significant further growth beyond that, according to LaPlante.
The new domain name has been in the planning since early 2000, explained LaPlante. Since then, Afilias has been working through its financing and registry operations, and it is now bringing the registry into operation.
Formal registration of new .info domain names will be open at http://www.afilias.info from 12 September 2001, and all new names are expected to become live and accessible through any Internet browser on 19 September 2001.
Although no figures are available as regards the cost of registration, this is likely to be comparable to that of registering with a typical .com domain name.
The new headquarters in Dublin are likely to include a staff of four or five initially, rising in due course to about 20, subject to market conditions.
Last year, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) authorised a variety of new top-level domain names all of which are due to come into use in the coming months. Along with .info, other new suffixes are .biz for general use, .pro for professionals, .name for personal Web sites, .museum for museums, .aero for airline groups and .coop for business cooperatives.
Afilias is at http://www.afilias.info.
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